A Service Level Agreement Driven Framework to Customise Cloud Service Billing

Abstract

Cloud service providers offer to their customers a variety of pricing policies, which range from the simple, yet widely used pay-as-you-go schema to complex discounted models. When executing the billing process, stakeholders have to consider usage metrics and service level objectives in order to obtain the correct billing and conform to the service level agreement in place. The more metrics, discount and compensations rules are added to the pricing schema, the more complex the billing generation results. In this paper we present a monitoring-based solution that enables the dynamically definition of both service level objectives and discount rules, so that providers can customise the billing generation process in terms of the service level agreement they offer. We validate our proposal in a real-world scenario, introducing a micro-service based software solution deployed in a Kubernetes cluster.